Services
A US-based, international courier delivery services firm that has been significantly expanding its operations in Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) and facing intense market competition. As a high proportion of processes were manual and repetitive, the client was exploring artificial intelligence (AI) based approaches to reduce the time brokers needed to complete jobs and minimize caged shipments.
The client faced three specific problems involving international shipments: extracting shipment information from documents, predicting harmonized system code (HS Code), and predicting the chance of shipments being caged. The client needed to scale up its EMEA customs clearance operations to meet the increased demand.
We, at Mphasis, started by gaining an end-to-end understanding of the clearance center operations process. Through joint Design Thinking workshops between our data scientists and the client’s stakeholders, we identified, scoped, and solved specific problems. Our solution encompassed the following:
• Disciplined brainstorming workshop with business stakeholders
• Interaction with clearance brokers in their natural environment
• In-depth understanding of clearance operations and the client’s business challenges
• Identification of sub-processes and tasks that are amenable to machine learning
• Automatic extraction of relevant information from commercial invoices and prediction of HS Code
• Analysis of historical shipment data for patterns that predict the shipments being caged
Our solution enabled the client to achieve the following benefits:
• Achieved 45 percent savings in processing time with HS code prediction. This productivity improvement was significant considering the time-critical nature of clearance operations
• Predicted HS code correctly 90 percent of the time, leading to fewer disputes
• Improved the client’s return on invested capital (ROIC)
• Reduced cost for processing caged shipments
• Improved on-time delivery of shipments to customers, leading to improved CSL
• Positive impact on productivity and customer experience